Memoir

A few weeks into the summer, one month before the start of eighth grade, two days after that psychologist’s directive to “count to ten in case of emergencies and limit your intake of simple carbohydrates,” you dropped me off with Grandmama in Forest, Mississippi. Before speeding off, you wiped away your tears. You said you were sorry. You kissed the roundest parts of my cheeks. You said you were sorry. You claimed Grandmama would make everything okay.

You said you were sorry. 

The summer I turned twenty-six, I stopped taking pictures. This wasn’t just out of character—this was abnegation of character, so foundational was my belief in a photographic clenched fist around the past. I have always been a writer, but I’ve never been a competent diarist; until that summer, I had measured out my life with photo sleeves.

After thirty years of disaster with men and fresh from a spanking-new heartbreak, I’m back in Miami, back in my dilapidated condo in paradise, to decide if it’s time to retire from love.

Even my mother thinks I should. When I called to tell her of the latest disaster, she sighed and said, Maybe, darling, you should give up on all that. Maybe it’s just time.

Okay, I’ve got other loves, after all. My broken-down mother. My blind old cat. A love poet who’s been dead two thousand years whose words I’m being paid to translate. A friend or two via text.